


Step-by-Step Instructions

by Quentanilien



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-24
Updated: 2014-11-24
Packaged: 2018-02-26 22:21:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2668469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quentanilien/pseuds/Quentanilien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raven heaves an exasperated sigh. "You've been working on this radio tower for weeks. I still don't understand why you need my help with it all of a sudden."</p>
<p>Wick claps a hand to his chest, an exaggerated expression of shock on his face. "What was that, Reyes? Do my ears deceive me, or—"</p>
<p>"Yeah, you heard me," she grumbles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Step-by-Step Instructions

**Author's Note:**

> From an anonymous prompt on tumblr requesting Raven/Wick and Bellamy/Clarke double date.

"This is the stupidest idea you've ever had."              

Wick just raises a challenging eyebrow. "Oh really? What about that time—"

"Yeah, it's even stupider than that time you thought it was a good idea to repair that door on your own and welded yourself into the supply closet by accident."

"What I was going to say," he forges ahead, like he didn't even hear her, "is that time I hid your helmet. You almost broke my nose."

"Well, you deserved it. Don't mess with this girl's zero-g gear." She smirks at him, trying to ignore the twinge of sadness at the thought of never making a zero-g repair again. Everything's happened so fast she's hardly had time to miss it, but a couple months on the ground and losing the use of one of her legs has reminded her just what she's lost. Most people didn't have hobbies on the Ark—her job was her hobby. She loved it and it was a part of her. That's all gone now.

Wick senses her change of mood instantly. Damn him and how well he knows her.

"Hang on, Reyes. Who says I welded myself in by accident? It was a nice supply closet, end of a double shift. I just wanted a little peace and quiet so I could take a nap."

Raven laughs and rolls her eyes. "Creating more work for the rest of us, as usual."

He chuckles, and they walk in silence for a while, at her pace, which is so slow she wants to scream in frustration. It's not helped by the fact that their route lies through the forest and up the incline of a hill. When she's not dragging her leg through the underbrush or hoisting it over fallen logs, she's taking a breather, trying not to pant from the unfamiliar exertion. He doesn't say a word about it, just follows her lead. Bellamy and Clarke trail behind them, guns in hand, protective as always. There's tentative peace with the nearby Grounder tribes, but there are worse things in the woods than Grounders.

Her bad foot catches on a root and she teeters momentarily, trying to regain her balance. Wick's hand goes for her elbow and she smacks it away, leaning hard on her cane to counteract the momentum.

"I'm fine," she snaps.

He holds his hands up in surrender. "Okay."

She can feel Clarke and Bellamy's concerned looks boring into her back, and she's glad they're behind her so she doesn't have to see them as well. She knows they care about her—she appreciates that—but she can't stand pity. And these days it feels like she sees pity everywhere, even where it doesn't exist.

She moves forward again, one slow step at a time, and tries not to pant when she asks, "How much farther?"

Wick squints up the hill. "Half a mile maybe?"

Raven snorts. "Maybe? You've made this trek half a dozen times. You should know."

"Well, excuse me for not acing Earth Skills like some know-it-alls I could mention."

Raven heaves an exasperated sigh. "You've been working on this radio tower for weeks. I still don't understand why you need my help with it all of a sudden."

Wick claps a hand to his chest, an exaggerated expression of shock on his face. "What was that, Reyes? Do my ears deceive me, or—"

"Yeah, you heard me," she grumbles.

He throws out an arm, declaring to the forest at large, "At long last, she admits one of my designs needs no improvements."

Raven sneaks a glance over her shoulder. Clarke has a tiny smile on her lips, but Bellamy frowns at Wick and orders, "Keep it down."

Wick gives him a short nod, turning to face forward again and muttering, "Buzzkill."

"Go easy on him," Raven protests, quietly enough that Bellamy won't hear her. "You don't know what he's been through, trying to keep everyone alive. Can't all be like you."

"Oh yeah? How's that?"

Raven's mouth opens and closes as she tries to find words to explain how Wick is. "Happy," she says at last, although she's not quite satisfied with the word.

He snorts, wipes a hand across his mouth. "Life's been pretty sucky in general for all of us. Might as well find the humor in it."

Raven doesn't say anything, because this is what she likes about Wick. He tells it like it is—no pretenses, no lies. He acknowledges the darkness, but he doesn't let it dim his light. It's comforting to be around him. She likes being around him.

She'd eat his hideous leg brace before admitting it, though.

"So the tower...you've got a better signal range up here? Six stations unaccounted for still, and they could be miles away, on the other side of the mountains, systems down." She tries not to think of all the dead already found at the Factory station site, burning up in the atmosphere on Arrow station. She wants to believe that there are other Ark survivors out there, but it's a slimmer hope the more time passes.

"Worth a try, anyway," Wick says grimly, like he was privy to her morbid thoughts. "Higher ground is better. I need you to walk me through that thing you do to prevent the mountain men from jamming the signal. Step by step."

"Step by step, huh?" Raven grins. "What, they don't teach you how to follow more than one instruction at a time in engineering?"

"Maybe because our instructions are far more intricate than yours."

"Get me out on a zero-g repair and I'll show you  _intricate_."

"You caught me, Reyes," Wick says, with a lopsided grin. "I just had to find an excuse to get you out here on a double date."

Raven raises an eyebrow. "A what?" she asks, injecting a challenging note into her tone.

He gives her an exaggeratedly scandalized expression. "Oh come on. You know, back in the good old days, two couples would go out together, get a milkshake or something."

Raven gives him a generous amount of side-eye. "Cool your jets, Wick. We're missing a few things. Two couples. And the milkshakes. We're literally missing everything that makes up a double date."

He shoots a glance over his shoulder, then leans closer to her, asking in a low tone, "You sure about that?"

Raven glances back too. Clarke and Bellamy are still walking side by side, guns in their hands, exchanging quiet words every once in a while. They're comrades-in-arms, co-leaders, friends. All of those things are a small miracle in themselves, considering where they started from. But what Wick is suggesting...she hasn't even considered it. Have they? Somehow she doesn’t think so.

She turns back to Wick, leaning close to him to whisper, "Don't let them hear you say that."

"Why, think Bellamy'd give me ten shocklashes for it?"

Raven laughs, shakes her head. "I'd put my money on Clarke."

"What about you?" He waggles an eyebrow.

"I'll settle for this," she says, and leans away so she can smack him in the arm with her cane.

He rubs his arm, mouthing a theatrical "Ouch."

"There's more where that came from," she warns, "if you speak the words  _double date_ again."

When they reach the top of the hill, the view momentarily takes Raven's breath away. It's mostly clear of trees, so she has a line of sight to the mountain range, meadows interrupting the endless forest, streams winding their silver-blue way through the valleys, Alpha station in the distance. She hasn't seen anything quite like it on Earth yet. Her time with the hundred was spent primarily in the dense woods, and she hasn't left Camp Jaha once until now. They're on a mission, but she can't help taking a few precious minutes to herself to appreciate the beauty.

What is it all for, if not for this?

She turns to look towards the east, and instead sees Wick, who's looking not at the beauty of nature but at her. He glances away, but not before she catches the soft look in his eyes, the half-smile on his face. She blinks a couple of times, startled. Has he always looked at her like that?

She turns to point her cane at his radio tower instead. It's about five meters tall, cobbled together with a lot of scrap metal, but it looks functional. "That it?"

"No, it's that tree over there," Wick replies, voice dripping with sarcasm.

Well, she deserved that. This hill's been completely reclaimed by nature—possibly never marked by civilization—and the tower stands out as much as their dropship ever did in the woods. Still, she mutters the obligatory, "What a piece of crap," and starts toward it.

Wick slides his pack off his shoulders and follows her. "Why, thank you," he calls cheerfully after her.

Clarke follows too, stands by Raven at the foot of the tower as they both look up at it. “Hey,” she says, “Bellamy and I are going to patrol the perimeter of the woods. You okay here?”

Raven nods and pats the handgun sitting snugly in its thigh holster on her good leg. It’s a miracle the four of them were allowed to leave Camp Jaha without a guard escort, and an even bigger miracle that the rules regulating firearms usage have been relaxed a little. But Clarke is a miracle worker, and a month on the ground has finally made the Ark residents see that on Earth, everyone has to be a soldier.

They settle down to work—Wick climbs the tower while Raven sits below and shouts up instructions to him, one by one as he’d asked. It takes the better part of an hour, and she forces him to make several equipment adjustments that he grouses irritably about, but in the end, she’s satisfied that they’ve set up a far-reaching signal that the mountain men won’t be able to block, for the time being anyway.

Wick climbs down, brushing his hands off on his pants as they study their handiwork with satisfaction.

“Looks pretty good,” he says, a trace of genuine pride in his voice.

“Well…I’m not ashamed to say I worked on it, at least,” Raven allows.

Wick groans. “Reyes, you’re killing me! Can you just for once admit—”

“Nope.” She turns to make her way over to Clarke, who’s sitting on a patch of grass working on a map. She’s been working on it for weeks, adding in bits and pieces of the terrain she covers. It’s her pet project, trying to reconcile the differences between the hundred-year-old maps they own and the way the land looks now, so they can know as much about their new home as possible. Bellamy’s pacing at a distance, keeping a watchful eye on everyone.

“Should we start back?” Raven asks Clarke, who looks up at her.

“Are you rested enough?”

If she’s honest with herself, her muscles are still aching in protest. No one else needs to know that. “Yeah, I’m good to go.”

Wick appears at her side, dropping his pack to the ground and unzipping it. “Well, that’s too bad, because we’re going to take a load off and eat.”

Clarke looks hesitant, eyes shifting between the two of them.

Bellamy walks up, gun slung over his shoulder now. “Is it done? What’s the hold-up?”

Raven’s not about to be the one to slow them all down. She’s determined not to be a liability. “Nothing, let’s go.” She takes a few steps forward, keeping the wince off her face, but these three people know her well enough to see right past that. Damn them.

“Come on, Blake,” Wick says good-naturedly. “Half an hour won’t be the end of the world.” He yanks a ration pack out and tosses it at Bellamy, who catches it one-handed.

He looks down at it, then up at Wick, then Raven, and finally Clarke, where his eyes linger. She gives a tiny, nearly imperceptible nod. “Yeah, okay,” he concedes, and sits down next to her.

Raven lets out a silent breath, grateful to all of them for forcing her to rest while making it seem like it isn’t about her at all. She sits down where she’s standing, and Wick brings her a ration pack and a bottle of water. She eats and drinks with abandon, exhaustion finally catching up to her, sneaking glances at the beautiful landscape stretched out in front of them every once in a while. It seems wrong, somehow, to stare at it too much when some of their people might be out there in it, dying.

Wick leans in, murmurs, “You can look at it for more than five seconds, you know.”

“Can I?” she asks quietly, and it’s not really a question. She’d thought there could be nothing more beautiful than Earth from space, but it turns out nothing compares to sitting in the midst of it. Earth is beautiful and deadly, and if she stops to look at its loveliness too much, she might forget about the deadly part.

“Yes,” he says, voice gone soft and serious. She glances up at him, and he’s giving her that look again, like _she’s_ what he climbed all this way to look at. Not the mountains, not the rivers, not the endless green, _her_ , and no one’s really looked at her like that before and she doesn’t know what to do with it.

She doesn’t have to, though, because he raises his bottle in a toast like it has moonshine in it instead of water. “To a job well done.”

She clinks her bottle against his, takes a drink, then adds, “Half well done. I wasn’t here for all of it.”

He makes a sound of disbelief and shakes his head, but Raven can see him smiling despite himself. It’s her turn to study him now, how different he looks in the sun than he did on the Ark, hair lighter and eyes less brown and more green than she’d thought. It’s a strange sensation, like she’s finally seeing him for how he truly looks, and it strikes her with sudden clarity that he didn’t drag her up here to work on the radio tower, not really. She could’ve written down the instructions, sent them along with him. He dragged her up here because _she_ needed to be here, to get out of Camp Jaha, to breathe freely, to feel like herself again. To carry herself here, step by painful step.

She wants to thank him, but she doesn’t have the words. “It’s beautiful,” she says instead, and she could be talking about any number of things.

Wick nods towards Bellamy and Clarke, who are now both bent over the map, eyes intently following the path of Clarke’s pencil. Clarke sits back with a satisfied smile, studying her handiwork, and Bellamy studies her, out of the corner of his eyes like he thinks no one’s looking. And suddenly, Raven sees a flicker of something she’s never noticed before, and maybe Wick’s not totally wrong.

“What do you know?” he says under his breath. “Looks like we’re on a double date after all.”

Raven whacks him in the arm with her cane again—because she’s a woman of her word—but she allows Wick to help her up from the ground, and when she catches a glimpse of Clarke’s map as she folds it up, instead of paths and coordinates, there’s a perfect replica of the landscape in front of them sketched out in one corner.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I purposely didn't address where Finn is and who's currently running Camp Jaha and whether or not they've rescued the 47 because this was for fun and establishing this AU canon was giving me a headache. So hope you enjoyed it, as long as you ignore the plot holes. :D


End file.
